


i’m drawn to you, honey, like the sea to the fisherman’s daughter

by prettydizzeed



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Domestic, Hurt/Comfort, Love Confessions, M/M, Mental Breakdown, Not Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018) Compliant, Post-Movie: Pacific Rim (2013), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Tenderness, they get a cottage by the beach...
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-13
Updated: 2020-04-13
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:14:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23626726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prettydizzeed/pseuds/prettydizzeed
Summary: “Where do you want to go?” Hermann asks after locking the lab door for the last time, their personal boxes balanced precariously on two hand trucks and the rest left inside to be redistributed to other government projects or left to collect dust or put in a museum or some shit, God knows, and Newt is overcome with the urge to sayLet’s just throw a dart at the map, baby,like they’re planning a destination wedding, even though they haven’t talked about any of it, pet names or marriage or whether they’re even going to end up in the same town.“Boston, I guess,” he says instead. “Haven’t seen my dad in a while.”
Relationships: Newton Geiszler/Hermann Gottlieb
Comments: 28
Kudos: 113





	i’m drawn to you, honey, like the sea to the fisherman’s daughter

**Author's Note:**

> Made a good run but I've run too far  
> Fought the battle of jalopy in this beat-up car  
> But I’m drawn to you, honey, like the sea to the fisherman's daughter  
> It's just a short walk on the water  
> I'm in love with you, honey, you've got nothing to fear  
> You're standing over there and I'm standing right here  
> The choice is for you, I can't make it for you though I wanna  
> —Josh Ritter, “On the Water”

When it’s over— _over_ over, for real, all the medical checks complete and the follow-up appointments scheduled and the emergency IVs removed and the backup glasses on the bridge of his nose—Newt cries. He goes to his room and sits on his bed, alone, curls up into a ball, and cries until he pukes. Cries until any reasonable, normal, healthy human body-and-mind combo would decide that’s just about enough, rinses his mouth out with tears streaming down his cheeks, brushes his teeth while trying not to choke on his own snot, and sobs himself to sleep. 

He doesn’t bother to tell himself it’ll be better in the morning. It isn’t.

He goes to the caf. Shovels down some breakfast. Checks in with the doctor. Goes to the lab. Monitors the site of the former Breach. And he just… doesn’t stop crying. Like, sure, there are moments when his tear ducts aren’t actively expelling water and salt, but he’s still stopping to wipe at his eyes five to six times a day, not counting at least two extended sobbing fits every twenty-four hours. 

It goes on for two months like this. In the meantime, Hermann starts the lab coffee pot every morning even though he’s sworn off the stuff, white-knuckled it through migraines for the three days immediately following the stopping of the clock, which stays frozen. It feels like time itself stopped then, too. Newt starts avoiding the area, taking circuitous routes through the Dome when necessary. But he shows up to the lab every morning, if only because he doesn’t want to picture Hermann’s expression should the coffee go cold, an echo of the helplessness he remembers from his bedside in the medical wing.

Newt grows his hair out, scraggly and uneven, longer at his neck and falling into his eyes. It’s less a conscious decision than the result of desperately ignoring his body. 

Hermann shaves his head.

“The sweaters are the only thing saving you from looking like a skinhead, dude,” Newt tells him, and Hermann rolls his eyes. 

“Thank heaven for that,” he says, tapping his cane wryly, and for a moment it’s like the war never ended, like they still know how to talk to each other. Newt tugs at the hair on the back of his neck, wonders how long it’ll be until he can put it in a ponytail. It’s not a good look right now, Hermann’s and his both, but that’s not the point.

“They set the deadline,” Hermann says, and Newt understands now what had succeeded in causing him to take a buzzer to his head last night where the apocalypse and its eventual cancellation had failed.

“How long until they kick us out?” he asks. Hermann presses his lips together into a long, thin line.

“Two weeks.” 

Newt swallows. “Guess I’d better, uh. Get started figuring out who these guys are going to.” He jerks a thumb at the kaiju samples, stored and labeled more neatly than they ever were during the war. Hermann nods. 

“Yes, I… I have some loose ends to tie, as well, I suppose.” 

They’ve already written what feels like hundreds of initial reports and supplementary reports and follow-up reports in the past few weeks, filled in all the blanks and _???_ s and trailed-off sentences in their notes to the best of their abilities, backed up their data no less than three ways, and made as many personal copies (legal or otherwise) as they could possibly need. They’ve been in limbo, preparing for the inevitable, for longer than most departments while the governments debated how long was too long to keep paying two frankly overqualified scientists to stare at an unchanging screen. The task of monitoring the former Breach site will fall to some intern, and they will go back to their lives. 

Continue their lives. Build their lives. Something. 

Somehow—theoretically, at least—they will have lives apart from the PPDC’s K-Science department. But first, they have to pack up the lab.

So they do. They kill time for a good six days emptying all of their desk drawers, sorting and re-sorting papers into Trash and Keep, and, in Newt’s case, Should’ve Been Turned In Ages Ago. Marshal Hansen takes the stack with barely an eye roll. Then they move on to cleaning every visible surface; Newt, of course, is tasked with the floor, which makes sense both because it’s easier for him than Hermann physically and because it’s 99.4% his mess, but he picks a fight about it anyway, out of the hope that it’ll make the corner of Hermann’s mouth twitch upward despite his irritation. It works, but not as effectively as usual. 

Hermann is stoic while wiping down his chalkboards, but he blanches when he steps back and sees them blank, and when he takes an awfully long time squeezing the rag out in the lab sink, Newt glances back at him and realizes he’s crying. Witnessing it feels more intimate than being in the man’s brain.

Newt just washed the coffee pot, so he sets it to brew just water, grabs a mug from the pile of dishes by the lab sink (all clean, for once, which is weirdly upsetting) and opens a teabag he’d found in one of his desk drawers that’s been sitting in a pile on top of the desk for the past week. Hermann keeps nagging him to move it to his room or put it in the trash. 

“Hey, uh,” he says, holding the mug of tea out. Hermann sniffles. “For all the coffee. You, uh, that’s been basically the only thing keeping me functioning these past couple months.” 

“Thank you, Newton,” Hermann says, and sits down to drink his tea at his empty desk. It’s their last day in the lab, with two days left to pack their things from their rooms before they’re kicked off the base for good. Newt should’ve been making plans over the past 12 days—really, since the Breach was closed—but he hasn’t so much as opened his email in ten weeks, and as terrifying as it is to think of walking out of the Shatterdome with no idea where to go from there, he’s immobilized by anxiety any time he so much as considers making a plan. 

Part of it, probably, is that it still feels like the future is something flimsy and gossamer and mythical, nice to think about for people who have that kind of time but not worth wasting precious seconds on when the clock is ticking up, up, up to the next attack. 

People had engaged in fantasies at first, maybe, about what they’d do when it was all over, but then it was seven, eight, nine years since he’d entered the Jaeger Academy, and it was hard to believe that this wasn’t just all there was, all his life would be until an attack that finally wrecked the world for good.

Then the clock stopped, and now instead he feels like he’ll always fall asleep to the sound of his own crying, face raw and chest empty. 

“Where do you want to go?” Hermann asks after locking the lab door for the last time, their personal boxes balanced precariously on two hand trucks and the rest left inside to be redistributed to other government projects or left to collect dust or put in a museum or some shit, God knows, and Newt is overcome with the urge to say _Let’s just throw a dart at the map, baby_ , like they’re planning a destination wedding, even though they haven’t talked about any of it, pet names or marriage or whether they’re even going to end up in the same town. 

“Boston, I guess,” he says instead. “Haven’t seen my dad in a while.”

Hermann hums in acknowledgement. “Can’t say as I prefer that city, but I’m amenable.” He swallows. Newt holds his breath. “That is, if you’ll have me.”

“Yeah,” Newt says, vaguely awestruck. “Yeah, man, I’m down. Of course.” 

Hermann smiles softly to himself, then asks if Newt has booked a plane ticket yet. He doesn’t seem surprised by the answer. He says he’ll handle it. They part ways, go to their separate rooms, and Newt is gripped by a brief but intense terror about what could’ve happened if Hermann hadn’t said anything, followed by a crushing relief. 

The next morning, Hermann knocks on his door at 0800, grabs Newt’s cell phone from where it’s resting on his desk, hands it to him, and waits while he calls his dad. Probably the best course of action, since Newt might have waited until they were on Jacob Geiszler’s doorstep to ask if they could stay for a few days. Or weeks. Months? He has no idea what the housing market is like in Boston nowadays. 

His dad says yes, of course, and Hermann leaves to get his shit together, and comes back to help Newt get _his_ shit together, and before they know it, it’s the next day and they’re leaving and Newt cries all the way to the airport, all the way through security, and Hermann gives him his handkerchief early on and, once they’re seated beside each other on the plane, puts his hand between them, palm up. Newt takes it.

*

Hermann exists in exactly two places in Newt’s father’s home: the pull-out couch and the chair at the foot of the kitchen table. His papers don’t spread to an area beyond a singular square foot. It’s like he’s trying to take up as little space as possible.

Newt, on the other hand, is trying desperately to be tangible. Wanders around like a ghost, like a zombie, like some other animal’s shed skin. Bumps into the couch during some early-morning pacing and stubs his toe and swears, and swears again as Hermann stirs. 

Hermann doesn’t glare at him, which is worse. He’s so sick of feeling fragile.

“Care to take a seat?” Hermann asks, sarcastic, and Newt exhales in relief at the familiar territory.

“Don’t mind if I do,” he says, less enunciated than usual, more lackluster, and plops down at Hermann’s feet. The springs squeak.

“What’s on your mind, Dr. Geiszler?” Hermann asks, and Newt scoffs, because they’re in their sleepwear, they’re in his _childhood home_ , to which Hermann followed him without question. The formality, at this point, is so beyond ridiculous, not to mention the surrounding content. 

He answers anyway.

“I feel like I’m fucking insane, man.” Newt is suddenly thankful for Hermann’s will of fucking steel, his absurd degree of stubbornness, because it means he doesn’t startle easily, doesn’t even let the edge of his eyebrow twitch at the admission. “Like, yeah,” Newt continues, “Whatever, I didn’t have the firmest grip on stability to begin with, but I literally can’t live like this.”

Hermann folds his hands in his lap, thoughtful, prim even on a sofa bed. “If you want someone to ‘this too shall pass’ you, you’ll have to ask elsewhere.” 

Newt laughs dryly. “I know.”

Hermann swallows. Nods. “But… Well, I do know a thing or two about living through things that will not, in fact, pass. It will feel… unmanageable,” he admits, “horrific and unsalvageable, possibly for a very long time, possibly for all time. But both the blessing and the curse of human existence is our capacity to survive things we never thought we could, even things we wish we could not.”

Hermann plucks at the bedspread for a moment, then looks at Newt. “I always imagined that this would have been helpful for me to hear, so: it is okay if you never recover from this. If you feel fragile, or broken, or unstable for the rest of your life—you will still, even then, _have_ a life. You will still have value, no matter how much pain you are in or how much you feel that the very pieces of your being are scattered so far apart as to be irreparable. You will still have value, Newton, and—I will still love you.”

He clears his throat, and Newt decides not to ask if he’d rehearsed that. “Can I hug you, man?” he asks instead.

Hermann nods, and Newt scoots up to stretch beside him on the shitty mattress and wrap his arms around him and get tears all over Hermann’s flannel button-down pajama shirt, with a pocket and everything.

“Thank you,” he adds after a minute. “Right back atcha, for real.”

“All of it?” Hermann asks, wryness shot through with hope, and Newt rests his chin on Hermann’s shoulder.

“Yeah. I love you, too.”

*

“What if we move to the fucking beach,” Newt says one morning, and Hermann raises an eyebrow and shares a glance with Newt’s dad and says, “Whatever you want, dear,” and the horrible thing is, Newt knows he means it. So they do, just a few miles from Boston, close enough for Hermann to commute to the university where he gets hired as an adjunct and to visit Newt’s dad for dinner every weekend. 

They don’t have a ton of money—saving the world isn’t very lucrative, apparently—but they’ll manage until Hermann gets hired full-time in the fall. “If we’re ever in a tight spot, we can always auction off all those medals,” Newt says on multiple occasions, and Hermann rolls his eyes and says, “Honestly, Newton,” every time.

It’s late July when Newt climbs out of bed, sits cross-legged on the tile of the kitchen, and listens to his lab tape recordings for six hours. He hears Hermann puttering about the bedroom at around eight and hits pause as he walks through the door.

“Hey,” he manages, and Hermann doesn’t sigh, but Newt can hear him shift his weight on his cane. Settling in for a long one.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Hermann asks quietly.

Newt looks at him. They’re in love, and Hermann pulls a chair up by the stove and lectures Newt about how to chop vegetables more nights than not, and they get handwritten letters from Tendo and Alison and Raleigh and Mako and send their own in response, like they’re a unit, Hermann’s cramped cursive next to Newt’s broad scrawl, and the world hasn’t been ending for six months, and Newt can’t stop crying.

“Maybe I don’t know how to live with nice things.”

“Oh, darling,” Hermann says, and Newt thinks this is going to go in the direction of _you and me both_ , but instead he continues, “Things don’t have to be quiet to be nice,” without even a _much as it pains me to say it_ as a preface or tacked on at the end. 

“What, should I sling some guts onto your side of the bedroom?” he asks, aware even as he says it that it’s unnecessarily sharp.

Hermann visibly shudders. “Do so and we will immediately replicate all those heterosexual couples you make fun of, because you _would_ be sleeping on the couch for the foreseeable future.” Newt laughs, and it shifts into a sob without his permission. “No,” Hermann continues, “I just mean—perhaps you need to find something to engage you.”

“What, while I’m like this?” Newt asks, gesturing to the snot threatening to drip onto his boxers, and Hermann, bless and damn him, passes him a handkerchief—from his goddamn _dressing robe_ , he’s a marvel and a menace—and nods, not looking the slightest bit disgusted. 

“Did you know,” Hermann says, tugging a chair over by hooking his cane around one of its legs, “that the Jaeger Academy had physical standards even for admittance into its science divisions?” 

He sits down. Always a master of timing, the dramatic bastard.

Newt vaguely remembers getting a physical, someone in a PPDC polo asking a few questions about his medications. He’s sure Hermann’s experience was far different.

“If you’re good enough at what you do,” Hermann says firmly, “which you are, people tend to pretend as if the rest of it doesn’t exist. That’s its own web of frustrations and microaggressions, mind, but I don’t doubt that you could be hired in a field you would find fulfilling.”

“What do I do that meets that?” Newt asks, raw and open, Fall Out Boy on full blast in his skull. _One day we’ll get nostalgic for disaster._ He’d hit his palms against the steering wheel in time with the lyrics until they were pink plenty of times pre-PPDC, which doesn’t even feel like a real part of his life anymore, just artful foreshadowing leading up to him splayed out on cheap tile, hair just long enough to pull into an awkward ponytail at the nape of his neck, baring his fucked-up soul to the man he loves. Some things would’ve been beyond even his imagination at sixteen. “What else can live up to the world ending?”

Hermann, who will berate Newt for twenty minutes about how he folded the pillowcase but never once falter upon being shown, full-scale and technicolor, every flaw that has ever managed to keep Newt up at night, merely folds his hands on the handle of his cane and tilts his head thoughtfully. “Oh, I’m sure there are dozens of less popular apocalypses bearing down around us.”

That afternoon, post-crying-on-Hermann and post-Hermann-making-brunch and post-nap, Newt picks his phone up off the bedside table and googles _the world is still ending_. The first search result is an article about how Kaiju Blue is fucking the oceanic ecosystems to hell. 

He texts the link to Hermann with the message _did i ever tell u one of my phds is in marine biology?_

Beside him in bed, a phone chirps, and Hermann looks down at it and smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> this fic was not inspired by “On the Water” but please go listen to it, it’s incredible and so soft
> 
> i’m on tumblr @campgender if you wanna yell about gay scientists!!


End file.
